Replicates and Repeats - what is the difference and is it significant

I  recently excavated this nugget frommy ReadCube for reference purposes, and thought I'd post a link because it is a worthy read.The thing with Teh Scienze is that there is a not inconsiderable gap between the Popperian sphere of how it probably should be done, and the Kuhnian sphere of how it actually ends up being done. Scientists, particularly life scientists, regularly and quite violently abuse statistics. 'Tis true. Indeed, if statistics were living things, not a single one of us would get IRB approval to do the sorts of things we do to statistics on a regular basis. Madam, at best we're talking forceful coercion; at worst, we're talking outright murder most foul. Indeed, statistics are all too often subjected to unnatural contortions of the most vile and egregious character, madam, and we scientists stand accused as the aggressor.We get away with it in large part for two reasons, I feel. First, via the relativity clause. That is, so long as our behavior towards statistics is, relatively speaking, minor and sufficiently ambiguous compared to the more direct outrages perpetrated on statistics by politicians, corporate lobbyists, and morning television presenters, Joe Public will continue to turn a blind eye, along with just about all the major journal editors, it seems. Second, as Kuhn frustratingly pointed out to Popper, the fact that science is, and has for a long time been, conducted in such an inconsistent, slipshod, half-baked, over-interpreted, capit...
Source: Across the Bilayer - Category: Medical Scientists Source Type: blogs